What do you want me to test?

by Jon Cooper

Numbers are awesome. Numbers make us more efficient. Numbers save us time, and they help us do things right the first time. Without numbers, there would be no analytics, and if we couldn’t analyze, then we could never improve.

With that said, I’m going to ask you all a favor. I need you to help me figure out what I should test. There are few data sets in the link building community that have revolutionized the way we’ve built links.

Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with:

What time of the day should we send out our emails to get the most responses?

What day of the week should we send out our emails to get the most responses?

What subject lines work best to get our emails opened?

I know I’ve only come up with 3, and I know all 3 only have to do with outreach, but it’s a start. If everyone reading this could do one of these three things, you’ll help me conduct an awesome study that we all can benefit from:

Tell me what you think of the three ideas I’ve listed & which one you’d most prefer

Depending on the idea we settle on testing, there’s a chance I might need your help figuring out how we want to go about testing it. Also, there might be a follow up to this post with a survey so we can vote on which one we’d like tested.

I’d vote for number 3. That’s be a great test! Also, include “Hi” and possibly “Fan Mail” in the test.

Also, here are a few other test ideas:
1. Test to see if “Google Bowling” still works as a ORM tactic. Test new sites and old sites (if possible). A friend of mine said it still works on sites that don’t update, but I’d like numbers.
2. A lot of SEOs are saying that traditional link networks still work. Create a traditional link network all under same hosting account. Be aggressive with anchor text and linking. We want to test and see how many of these sites are penalized. Do any remain untouched? How is are target domain affected?
3. Influencing CTR and thus rankings with Mechanical Turk. I know it’s been done before, but this would be specifically for rankings – not Google Suggest.

Thanks Cleo! #1 definitely sounds interesting & testable. #2 would be a little difficult, but I’ll keep it in mind. Can you explain #3 a bit more? I think I understand, but if you could explain it a little more, that would be outstanding.

Maybe you can do some testing on the link segmentation and which is better to link to category pages or individual pages themselves.

I think if we take panda and freshness together I would like to prove the following true;

If one has a category page that is constantly updated at least once per month with links to new articles relevant to that category on site SEO is done on hundred present and content is super cool and useful.

I believe building various type of authorative backlinks to these category pages will have a greater affect than to the deeplink pages themselves?

of course throw a few relevant on topic partial match backlinks to them too, but focus on the category pages.

Can you really test the first option? From my experience, if you have a very large database of email addresses and you sent an email out at can take hours to process the whole list and your emails can arrive at different people at very different times. Personally I’d be most interested in reading some more about number 3.